The Little Friend

“Oh, he’ll be out again soon enough, never you worry,” said Edie crisply. “They hardly catch these people and lock them up before they let them out again. Don’t you want your breakfast?” she said, noting Harriet’s untouched tray.

Harriet made a conspicuous display of returning to her rice. If he’s not dead, she thought, then I’m not a murderer. I haven’t done anything. Or have I?

“There. That’s better. You’ll want to eat a little something before they run these tests, whatever they are,” said Edie. “If they take blood, it may make you a little dizzy.”

Harriet ate, diligently, with her eyes down, but her mind raced back and forth like an animal in a cage, and suddenly a thought so horrible leapt afresh to her mind that she blurted, aloud: “Is he sick?”

“Who? That boy, you mean?” said Edie crossly, without looking up from her puzzle. “I don’t hold with all this nonsense about criminals being sick.”

Just then, someone knocked loudly on the open door of the room, and Harriet started up from her bed in such alarm that she nearly upset her tray.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Baxter,” said the man, offering Edie his hand. Though he was young-looking—younger than Dr. Breedlove—his hair was thinning at the top; he was carrying an old-fashioned black doctor bag which looked very heavy. “I’m the neurologist.”

“Ah.” Edie looked suspiciously at his shoes—running shoes with fat soles and blue suede trim, like the shoes the track team wore up at the high school.

“I’m surprised yall aren’t having rain up here,” the doctor said, opening his bag and beginning to fish around in it. “I drove up from Jackson early this morning—”

“Well,” said Edie briskly, “you’ll be the first person that hasn’t made us wait all day around here.” She was still looking at his shoes.

“When I left home,” said the doctor, “at six o’clock, there was a severe thunderstorm warning for Central Mississippi. It was raining down there like you wouldn’t believe.” He unrolled a rectangle of gray flannel on the bedside table; upon it, in a neat line, he placed a light, a silver hammer, a black gadget with dials.

“I drove through some terrible weather to get here,” he said. “For a while I was afraid I was going to have to go back home.”

“Well, I declare,” said Edie politely.

“It’s lucky I made it,” said the doctor. “Around Vaiden, the roads were really bad—”

He turned, and as he did so, observed Harriet’s expression.

“My goodness! Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not going to hurt you.” He looked her over for a moment, and then he closed the bag.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll just start out by asking you some questions.” He got her chart off the foot of the bed and gazed at it steadily, his breaths loud in the stillness.

“How about that?” he said, looking up at Harriet. “You’re not afraid of answering a few questions, are you?”

“No.”

“No sir,” said Edie, putting the newspaper aside.

“Now, these are going to be some real easy questions,” said the doctor, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “You’re going to be wishing that all the questions on your tests at school were this easy. What’s your name?”

“Harriet Cleve Dufresnes.”

“Good. How old are you, Harriet?”

“Twelve and a half.”

“When’s your birthday?”

He asked Harriet to count backward from ten; he asked her to smile, and frown, and stick out her tongue; he asked her to keep her head still and follow his finger with her eyes. Harriet did as she was told—shrugging her shoulders for him, touching her nose with her finger, bending her knees and then straightening them—while all the time keeping her expression composed and her breath calm.

“Now, this is an ophthalmoscope,” the doctor said to Harriet. He smelled distinctly of alcohol—whether rubbing alcohol, or drinking alcohol, or even a sharp, alcohol-smelling aftershave, Harriet could not tell. “Nothing to worry about, all it’s going to do is flash a real strong light back there on your optic nerve so I can see if you’ve got any pressure on your brain …”

Harriet gazed fixedly ahead. An uneasy thought had just occurred to her: if Danny Ratliff wasn’t dead, how was she going to keep Hely from talking about what had happened? When Hely found out that Danny was alive, he wouldn’t care any more about his fingerprints on the gun; he would feel free to say what he wanted, without fear of the electric chair. And he would want to talk about what had happened; of that, Harriet was sure. She would have to think of a way to keep him quiet …

The doctor was not true to his word, as the tests grew more and more unpleasant as they went along—a stick down Harriet’s throat, to make her gag; wisps of cotton on her eyeball, to make her blink; a hammer rapped on her funny bone and a sharp pin stuck here and there on her body, to see if she could feel it. Edie—arms crossed—stood off to the side, observing him closely.

“You look mighty young to be a doctor,” she said.